begin rant

The aside to all of this would be that after a month of trying, Comcast has finally got their act together and hooked up my cable access. For those who were curious, Comcast is the devil. I will never recommend them as a digital service provider. Their customer service representatives and technicians mean well, but fail to communicate with one another, and often fail to go that extra mile required to complete a task. It seems to be easier for them to close out an account than to admit that they can't close problem tickets.

I wouldn't even be using them, except that they are literally the only game in town down here in south Florida. You can tell that they are a monopoly, because only a monopoly would refuse to take your money when you offer it to them. I may even yet look forward to having my service cut off, because their billing department appears to have screwed up my account now that the cable is hot.

Or maybe I'll just have free cable for a while. Who knows? There could be certain advantages to their incompetence.

Posted by Derksen at 3:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It is almost hard to believe that this is a trailer for a videogame, and not just the next big special-effects laden summer action-blockbuster film. The once bright lines between videogame, interactive entertainment, and film are rapidly fading.

You can say many things about Microsoft, but you cannot say that they do not take their games division seriously. They are aware, just as Sony and Apple (who as a latecomer to the party has only recently developed an appreciation for such) have become aware of how important to long-term business development establishing a baseline infrastructure of consumer "lifestyle" electronics in a home can be.

You may buy the computer for "business" purposes, but if the "kids" can play games on it, and you can also use it for communication, then it replaces several other subsidiary devices that might be constructed by a competitor. If your basic hardware integrates well or complements other devices by expanding functionality, then one purchase can provide for a whole string of downstream purchases. The game or business machine may also be able to play BluRay discs, which implies that you would need a surround-sound system - and the licenses (remember, kids: you don't buy products anymore, just the license to use them until a corporation executes its "at-will" termination clause of the licensing agreement that you contractually bound yourself to the second you opened the package) to play particular films on those machines. Perhaps you would then like to take your whole music or video library on the road with you? Another purchase - and so on.

An excellent business strategy, and one which has contributed to and capitalized upon the accelerating erosion between various forms of entertainment - and allowed certain media traditionally appreciated "only by children" to mature with those persons raised upon it. A generation of consumers, gradually becoming more sophisticated and complex in the way they consume media - and producing more complex and sophisticated media as they mature. Those lines will have been obliterated when interactive media finally becomes as commercially viable with as diverse a series of topics and themes as film eventually achieved.

There is considerable evidence suggesting that it is already well underway.

Posted by Derksen at 1:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The server upon which this site is being hosted is being reset and improved. As such, files and articles may come and go, talking of Michelangelo...

Posted by Derksen at 9:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

My old company just axed another quarter of their staff during the weekly meeting this afternoon. It was an unpleasant surprise to most of the assembled staff, and apparently the CEO was too craven a coward to make the announcement himself this time. I am rapidly running out of people that I met there who still work there. This is their third round of layoffs, and each one has cut staff by at least twenty percent. This does not bode well for the future of the company, but I suppose that they are slimming the workforce in order to concentrate all of their diminishing resources on one of their three drug candidates currently in clinical trials.

Once again, I must reflect and recognize that I am lucky to have left when I did. I almost certainly would have been fired in the first round; I was in a superfluous and overstaffed department, and was a malcontent and rabble-rouser. I do wish that it hadn't unemployed so many of my friends quite so suddenly.

I wish them all the best on their roads ahead, and I even hope that the company does survive this latest downturn. Whatever reservations I have about the conduct of certain scientists employed there or the management team, the biochemistry recorded was amazing in its breadth and depth. Many of their drug targets show incredible promise as treatments for debilitating and terrible diseases, and I suspect that given sufficient time and resources, Lexicon will eventually produce a product of note and value.

Posted by Derksen at 5:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"You know how I love to watch you work, but I’ve got my country’s five-hundredth anniversary to plan, my wedding to arrange, my wife to murder, and Guilder to frame for it. I’m swamped."
- Prince Humperdinck, the Princess Bride

The Book of Hours that will determine my ebb and flow for the next six months:

• Degree Application Deadline
  September 19, 2008
  This is the last date by which to apply for graduation using UF's registration system.
  I've completed this, but I should reconfirm.
• Doctoral dissertation first submission
  October 13, 2008 4:00 PM
  While this is not actually a deadline that I am responsible for, it is a good target date to keep in mind in order to complete my defense by the following date.
• Master’s Thesis First Submission
  November 3, 2008 4:00 PM
  Thesis first submission (defended, signed, formatted, on paper) to Editorial (160 Grinter) for review. While this is technically a draft submission, everything actually already needs to be done by this date in order to satisfy my committee.
• Final Thesis Submission
  December 2, 2008 5:00 PM
  Deadline for “Final Clearance” status in the EDM system in order to qualify for degree this term. If there were any significant or substantial changes from two weeks ago, I'd never have passed the defense. This deadline is really for sorting out additional paperwork and dealing with technical formatting issues and printing standards.
• Degree Certification
  December 23, 2008
  Congratulations. Assuming that you didn't screw things up, you're done and you can move on with your life. Have a very merry Christmas!

Posted by Derksen at 3:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"Coffee is the common man's gold, and like gold it brings to every man the feeling of luxury and nobility.... Where coffee is served there is grace and splendour and friendship and happiness."
- attributed to Abd al-Qadir

It is amazing how as little as a quarter cup of coffee can turn your whole morning around. I may someday dedicate an entire sub-category of tag on this website to it, given how frequently the magic drug appears in my musings.

That, and in my old age I am finding that perhaps there is something to this whole "go to bed before midnight" thing. I've been collapsing at around eleven in the evening these days, which makes rising at seven much less of a battle. I still don't think I'll ever be the sort to get up and go running at six - as I suspect that neither coffee nor an early slumber will ever make me a morning person.

After all, phenotype can be limited by genotypic potential, no matter what the environment.

Posted by Derksen at 11:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Since it seems to be a theme, I might as well introduce my latest pair of shoes:

After slightly more than a year here, I can suggest that the constant moisture and humidity of South Florida really does a number on footwear. My previous pair lasted considerably less than a year before rotting away until my toes started to poke out the distal end, and the tread of the soles had worn down to an almost unrecognizable veneer of rubber. It was desperately past time to replace them, and I decided to go back to my roots.

For those who are not in the know, my roots are mired in the thick soil of high-quality hiking boots. Of course, I have been told that it was "not very fashionable to stomp around polite society in such things", and I eventually made certain concessions to style, comfort, and my fencing coach by surrendering to running shoes.

Running shoes can be a great joy, as a good pair feels like putting on a fresh set of socks in the morning - but they do not appear durable enough to survive the heady subtropical jungle of Southern Florida. I decided to compromise, and turned instead to the North Face and their waterproof line of trailrunners. Trailrunners are an odd hybrid of both running shoe and hiking boot, with a stiffer sole, slightly more ankle support, and built of a tougher fabric. I used to have a pair of Nikes that I was exceptionally fond of, but these new guys are growing increasingly comfortable.

We'll see if I still wear them on my feet in another year.

Posted by Derksen at 8:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If you spend a lot of time at your job performing endlessly monotonous and dull things, like counting the number of flowers produced by a plant (or the population of thrips crawling inside those same flowers), you will often find yourself turning to some sort of interesting background distraction just to keep your mind awake and focused. The music served up by my iPod has always been great, but sometimes I need something a little different. Something to make that brain time that is spent hanging while counting a little more useful, more refreshing.

As such, one of my recent favorite distractions has been Steve Eley's Escape Pod. Graduate school has not left a lot of time or energy leftover for pleasure reading, and I miss my occasional dose of speculative fiction. Mr Eley's podcast gives me a chance to escape from my humdrum surroundings for a slightly longer than half an hour, and provides the perfect accompaniment to mindless labour or car rides into the distance.

The quality varies, and is mostly dependent upon your individual preferences, but I haven't found or heard anything that I really disliked, and thus far there has been much to enjoy. The tales range in nature from fantastic WWII adventures in (meta)physics to cynical comic books, traditional tales of Area 51 skunk-works, and the alien quest for identity and meaning. Santa might even be able save Christmas from the heat-death of the Universe.

And hey, my old friend Jeremy Tolbert might even have a story or two on there to listen to.

Check it out.

Posted by Derksen at 7:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Okay, I've mentioned these guys before. It seems that since last we spoke, both Fanboys Productions and RvD have unleashed a sequel to their earlier projects upon the web. Both sequels would have been impossible without the community of support that they have developed since releasing their products out into the wild. The creative endeavors of these guys survive entirely upon the generosity of their fans.

Six in the Morning continues to emphasize both aspects of responsibility as well as unadulterated geekery as their tale stretches on. While not entirely sophisticated drama, it is a thoughtful analysis of what it means to have power - and to be legally liable for the use of that power. It also delights in toying around with whirling and glowing sticks. RvD2 does not bother with the pretense of story. This is solely a display of fight choreography distilled to its purest. Both pictures are strong at what they do best, and while both remain far less polished, they are also inarguably better and far less disappointing than any of the last three Star Wars films.

Kudos to the independent filmmaker.

I wish them well, wherever their respective futures carry them.

Posted by Derksen at 9:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

And sometime late last night as we pulled out of the parking lot, my car finally rolled past a hundred thousand miles. It took far less than the two to three weeks that I had expected. Congratulations: we're alive, but it was still quite an experience.

What does the future hold?

Time will tell.

Time always does.

Posted by Derksen at 10:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Some time within the next two to three weeks, my car will turn one hundred thousand. So begins the end of the journey. My "new" 2002 racing stallion was purchased towards the end of 2001, which makes it almost seven years old. That is a little less than 15000 miles per year, which is a respectable bit of driving. We have come a long way together, and I would love to see it get another hundred thousand miles going forward. I have confidence in the engineers of Toyota, and some of my friends' old models lasted well over a hundred and fifty thousand miles before finally giving up their much beloved ghosts.

We shall see.

Posted by Derksen at 5:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So... I remembered a few things about myself this weekend. I have been housesitting for one of the folks related to the research station, and it reminded me of what I liked about living and working around a real home.

The first is that I really like stereo sound, and I have missed it terribly. I plugged my host's speakers to my laptop, and the improvement in my movie-watching capability was dramatic. Headphones are okay, but nothing beats the freedom a pair of cheap speakers and a small subwoofer can provide. I can only imagine how much better my surround sound system will appear to me when I finally return to civilization and a television that provides more than monaural output.

The second thing I have rediscovered is that I focus better with less white noise. I am okay with music blazing clear, or random nature rustling in the background, but the steady whine of machinery like the incubator beside my desk can be incredibly distracting. It gets inside my head and it grinds against my brain - and it drives me crazy. It makes me want to plug my ears up and go to sleep.

So I just need to find good clear sound for my brain to function right.

Muses, are you listening?

Posted by Derksen at 8:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

With a twist tie, which is a marked improvement over the duct-tape that was once holding it together. Surprisingly, I am not responsible for the duct-tape, but methinks that I will never use the dealer for an oil change ever again. Of all the people in the world whom you would believe would have the proper screws to put things back together right, you would think the dealer would be the first.

Posted by Derksen at 4:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Folks who have known me entirely too long for their own good might be amused to take note of the following lab vehicle:

It is almost as old as my old yeep, and has just as many problems with the air conditioning, power steering, brakes, windows, engine, and oil - but it is also just as responsive as my old warhorse once was. In fact, when I first made its acquaintance, I was not completely certain that it was not my old beast. It would have been fitting and appropriate for us to have found one another thousands of miles from where we last parted ways.

For such a lunker of a car, it handles pretty well - and could probably manage any exit that the highway might provide.

Posted by Derksen at 4:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This weekend, some lucky cads found out quite by accident that the UF graduate student insurance information listserv had been left open and unsecured, and that anyone replying to it could be heard and read by all recipients. This security failure eventually resulted in an amusing series of postings from the very diverse graduate student community. It certainly resulted in an undue amount of what could be considered "spam" in many persons' mailboxes, but it also showed a strong desire among the graduate student body for some sort of forum or mailing list where we could find common cause and to try and connect with one another as just another oppressed minority outside of our own departments.

The messages received contained humor, a request for volunteers at the local homeless shelter, the complete text of Beowulf, an offer for a slightly used Suzuki Bandit, suggestions for Christmas presents, and a recipe for baked potatoes that I will now share with you:

The Perfect Baked Potatoe

"This baked potato has a crisp, golden skin, and is light and fluffy on the inside. Great comfort food!"

PREP TIME 1 Minute
COOK TIME 1 Hr 30 Min
READY IN 1 Hr 31 Min

INGREDIENTS

• 1 medium baking potato
• 1 teaspoon olive oil
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 2 teaspoons butter
• 1 pinch freshly ground black pepper
• 1/4 cup shredded Cheddar cheese

DIRECTIONS

1. Preheat the oven to 300 degrees F (150 degrees C). Scrub the potato, and pierce the skin several times with a knife or fork. Rub the skin with olive oil, then with salt.
2. Place the potato in the preheated oven, and bake for 90 minutes, or until slightly soft and golden brown. Slice the potato down the center, and serve with butter and black pepper. Sprinkle shredded Cheddar cheese over the top, if desired.

For a treat, try slicing the very top of the potato off rather than slicing it in two, forming a 'lid'. Scoop out the fluffy contents of the potato, keeping the skin intact. Mix the potato in a bowl with butter, grated cheese and black pepper, then spoon the mixture back into the skin. Replace the lid and serve.

Posted by Derksen at 7:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last night, I had a little trouble picking my roommate up from the airport.

To be perfectly honest, it wasn't that bad a collision. Traffic stopped on 826N, and so did I... but the truck behind me carried too much inertia into my rear bumper - where it did its job admirably. I didn't even get knocked into the green Saturn that had stopped in front of me.

No one was injured, and I suppose that is all that matters - but it does irritate the heck out of me that the other driver chose not to stop and share their insurance information, and that my passenger and I were too jazzed and too surprised to get their license plate number as they barreled past on their way to wherever they were going.

Of course, the trunk doesn't really open or close that well anymore, and the left rear brake light is no longer functioning, and I have no idea what else may be stressed in the general frame of the car. I know that I am stressed, because I live in Miami, a city in a state that requires all persons to be insured to carry a valid driver's license, and where half of the people in the county are uninsured. As a result, my insurance has a thousand dollar deductible for uninsured or hit-and-run motorists, and I am not a happy camper.

But no one is injured.

Maybe. My neck feels a little stiff, but sorting signal from noise is difficult: I am not sure if this is from staring into a microscope all of yesterday afternoon, or from the sudden bump at the end.

Posted by Derksen at 10:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Another band and another concert from NPR's live summer concert series: the increasingly popular sounds of "the Arcade Fire". While the concert was actually back in February as part of their Neon Bible tour, NPR has been kind enough to archive all of this classic goodness for you. Their upbeat indie pop has a driving beat, and it certainly is something to listen to while you count endless armies of chili thrips under the microscope.

Feel free to subscribe to the podcast and hunt through their archives for other gems, or just download the MP3 from me right here.

Posted by Derksen at 3:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So lately my roommate and I have been taking advantage of Netflix's "watch it now" feature. It is a great idea, and works surprisingly well for what it is. The movie is streamed directly to your Windows-compatible computer, and usually starts after only a minute or two of buffering. The video and sound quality aren't bad, and the picture looks much better on my roommate's monitor than it does on the awful and ancient VHS-compatible television that came with the trailer. You can add subtitles (for those frequently depressing foreign films that appear to be the staple diet of outlandishly classy graduate students living in squalor), and fast-forwarding really isn't much more than selecting a section slightly farther ahead in the stream and waiting for the buffer to reload. I'm not sure if the system will handle six-channel surround sound, or an HD-signal, but the future is coming.

Given the convenience of this model, I am fairly certain that this will eventually supplant traditional hard-media as a form of temporary distribution. Discs and the like will remain in one format or another for more permanent storage of media... but the ease and quality by which film could be distributed over legitimate channels may eventually grow to compete with those currently offered by the free pirate networks. Any media company not working on a method to distribute their content through such a mechanism is taking the slow road to extinction.

Which is not to say that there are not hiccups or problems with the extant system. My roommate and I are kind of borrowing our network signal from a neighbor, and streaming video does seem to take up a chunk of the bandwidth. That, and if your access is interrupted by any of a number of third-world power and cable failures that seem to plague Miami and Homestead with frightening regularity, you may lose your place in the film and spend your Netflix minutes reloading the same film twice.

Apple provokes further personal irritation. Apparently they consider Netflix a competitor to the digital distribution of film that their iTunes network could provide, and as such have not made it any easier for Netflix programmers to design a platform-independent video-player. Time will tell if this competitive strategy works or not, but in the meantime it means that I have to use my roommate's computer or boot mine up with Boot Camp.

Posted by Derksen at 7:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

One of the little inconveniences we encountered during ACL-fest was our general inability to contact and reach one another within the relatively narrow confines of Zilker park. Due to the enormous crowds packed with thousands of people there, it would have been impossible to find one another without some sort of plan.

Many persons attempted to solve this problem by carrying unusual banners with them. Just as fighting for the honor of the flag must once have provided cohesion and direction during the confusion and mayhem of early warfare, so too did these proud standards provide rallying points for lost travelers in search of old friends. Of course, the more unusual and unique your flag, the better. It would help to avoid discussions such as, "but which jolly roger are you standing at the base of? I've already been to three, and the concert is almost over..."

The next ideal strategy would be to meet one another at distinctive landmarks at prearranged points and times between acts, but to push through the press of the crowd sometimes made it difficult to meet such deadlines. Those same crowds could pack people so densely that you could be standing less than ten feet from your party, but never see them through the forest of strange faces. Even being able to see them might not help, for a particularly popular act might present an audience so dense in attendance and so rapt in appreciation that it would be impossible to greet your friends without being extraordinarily rude, and just shouldering through the crowd.

In the face of such difficulties, we could try to turn to modern technology for a solution. Cell phones have done wonders for the ability of two lost and misplaced groups to find one another in the modern world, but they are only useful so long as one can hear what the person on the other end of the receiver is saying. Crowds and rock and roll make this exceptionally difficult, and so we were forced to fall back on text-messenging between phones. Of course, text-messenging only works so long as there is a network line available to carry your signal. When ten-thousand people suddenly want to see each other all at once, some things tend to get lost in the æther for a little while. As an amusing example, I am only now receiving messages that were sent to me on Sunday afternoon...

Better late than never, I suppose...

Posted by Derksen at 7:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So lately there has been a minor technical difficulty with the server that hosts this mindless page you read before you, and all of it might have been wiped out. While it might have been interesting to start again with a completely blank slate, I would have missed this. I am a man who likes to carry a sense of personal history, and for what it is worth, this site does provide that context to me; helping me to remember who and where I was - or what I wanted to be.

This site contributes to seven or more years of my personal extended memory, and occasionally provides a sense of outreach to those who need to keep track of me.

Soooo...

I'm back, and for most of you, I suppose it is as if I had never left.

Posted by Derksen at 11:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"For me, a symbol of that state is a Bedouin mounted on a camel and clad in traditional robes under which he is wearing jeans, with a transistor radio in his hands and an ad for Coca-cola on the camel's back. I am not ridiculing this, nor am I shedding an intellectual tear... I see it rather as... proof that SOMETHING is happening, something is being born, that we are in a phase when one age is succeeding another, when anything is possible."
- Václav Havel, The Need for Transcendence in the Postmodern World

Posted by Derksen at 12:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I was just given the go-ahead to set up my wireless in the lab.

Zing!

I am writing this from the other side of the room, away from my desk. Now I'd like to see how much of a signal I can leapfrog back to the trailers. If I were to do so, I might become an immediate hero to my peers.

Next stop? Networked printer.

Posted by Derksen at 10:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It seems that on my way back from the grocery store, I blew out a tire. This is quite a blowout. I must have run over a piece of metal from the numerous construction projects out here. I am only thankful that it happened as I drove back into the complex, and not somewhere considerably farther up the road. I've had to empty the trunk of the carload of things I plan on taking back into storage just to get the spare tire and jack out. It'll be fixed soon enough, and then I'll go buy me a new tire.

Posted by Derksen at 10:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

One of the advantages to my new home is that the sun peeks in through my window as it rises, and very little will keep its persistant determination from lifting the lids of my eyes for very long. As a result, I was up at what might normally be considered an unnaturally early hour of the morning for myself - especially on the weekend. Lacking anything better to do with my time, or failing to want to do anything more than get some breakfast and go back to sleep, I watched my version of Saturday morning cartoons on Google Video.

I put a bagel in the toaster, spread some peanut butter on it, and sat down to watch Craig Mello give a talk at Google corporate headquarters on his Nobel-winning research on RNAi as part of their continuing seminar series on emerging technologies. The tech talks are interesting because they give you a look into what the almighty Google is thinking about buying and turning into their next cash-cow. Dr. Mello's talk is interesting because he is a good speaker and does an excellent job of translating highly technical jargon into plain english that the layperson might understand and appreciate without feeling condescended to. That, and he is talking about RNA interference, one of the single most interesting and important topics to hop along through molecular biology in the last ten years. To say that I am excited by its potential application in various subfields of biology and chemistry would be something of an understatement.

If you have an hour and ten minutes to kill, I highly recommend that you check it out...

Posted by Derksen at 12:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Wow, Steve Jobs essentially agrees with me about the nature of DRM. The difference being that with control over nearly seventy percent of the market for digital music and being in possession of the biggest winner in the personal electronics that will play the music for the foreseeable future... what he says may actually change things.

Keep thinking different.

Posted by Derksen at 6:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"Something is rotten in the state of Denmark."
- Marcellus, Hamlet (I, iv, 90)

For all intents and purposes, my laptop is dead. While I may yet go in search of a third opinion, two separate IT-professionals have concluded that some component on the motherboard has gone wrong and leads to an increasing series of internal errors that eventually stack up and result in the unusual freezing behavior approximately five to ten minutes after power-up. As this is a laptop, single components can not be easily removed and replaced, and to repair it would allegedly require replacing the entire motherboard - at the cost of nearly $750.

For twice the price, I can have a brand new laptop with four to six times the power and ability.

This time, I will remember to purchase the extended warrantee that would have covered my issues with motherboard or heat-sink or the boot-sector on the hard-drive or whichever of my components has failed, resulting in this crash. While my family has been universally satisfied with Apple products, and have never had so critical a failure - it appears that laptops are somewhat more fragile, and more prone to damage and destruction. I suppose I should have expected it - given the amount of thumping and bumping the poor beast takes (took?) as I carry it everywhere - and through all kinds of weather.

My laptop is dead. Long live my laptop.

Posted by Derksen at 6:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This afternoon, my computer has spontaneously chosen to turn itself into an expensive brick of white plastic and printed circuits. While I can still access e-mail and this station via campus terminals, the majority of my contact information and professional data remains interred on the now silent hard-drive. The usual ritual incantations and mumblings have failed to resurrect it from the great beyond, and my last external backup was at the beginning of finals week.

I had actually scheduled an additional backup for this afternoon when the machine locked up.

Until such time as I can get my machine up and running again - or at least figure out a trickier way to export some of the more personally important data, please feel free to contact me via the usual alternative methods.

Posted by Derksen at 5:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It is amazing how much of a difference three hours can make.

Three hours to the South of Gainesville, there is still sun, and the leaves are still green. Gainesville may never quite experience winter, but it unquestionably sees fall as the leaves here turn to yellow and gold and sail and swirl away on the wind.

Visiting family for Turkey Day was good. Family is good. They have helped to fill the empty space that my surrogate family made up of my extended network of friends used to fill... or maybe I have that backwards. Whichever it is, I know that it makes a difference to sit down and break bread with people, and to see the same faces every day. There is more than a sense of community - there is a sense of 'belongingness' that I did not find outside of Austin. Besides, few things in the world beat watching your aged and respectable parents laugh and chase after dragonflies with an enormous butterfly net.

Finally got a new battery for my laptop, and it is rather like falling in love all over again: I have no strings, and I may wander. No longer do I need to worry about squandering power frivolously on such things as a monitor with gamma bright enough to read. No longer must I race from outlet to outlet, hoping that I will have enough charge to last all the way through class.

So life is good.

Then again, I am about to re-enter hell-week. You should either expect extended silence from this station, or lengthy tales of procrastination. One of the things I do not miss about the whole educational program is the sheer number of things that must fall together at the last possible minute. I am moving forward, and with far more diligence than in my undergraduate years - but... Yeesh. Corporate life retrained me to accept lower standards, but I am starting over and I refuse to hand in anything less than a solid effort.

Time will tell.

Posted by Derksen at 9:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I could leave an essay here on how the internet is a wonder when it comes to the phenomenon of distribution, and mention that it has made the careers of several young animators and filmmakers - but I'd be happier to just show you a couple of Star Wars fan films.

YouTube also has several smaller presentations of the films available for streaming download.

It is still interesting to note the relatively high production quality of these amatuer films put together by what amount to a bunch of bored high-school and college students. The advent of digital filmmaking and now digital distribution have made these guys virtual stars overnight. The tools of production have become much cheaper and more accessible; where once it might be unusual for a public school to have a camera for analog video, even some high-end cell phones now include a respectable digital video camera. Where before it might have been difficult to edit video or add sound and post-production SFX to a production, many computers now include this software as part of their basic installation.

Most importantly, the channels of distribution have broadened and become more accessible to any with an internet connection, lowering the obstacles to achieve your desired target audience. Ryan Wieber certainly parlayed his success into a career with LucasArts, and fans of other popular media have also launched their careers on the back of a successful intellectual property...

Posted by Derksen at 6:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This is a test, and only a test of the not-exactly-an-emergency blogcasting system. I would like to thank Dana Watson for encouraging me to use these tools to publish my thoughts. She was correct: they do provide an excellent vehicle from which to publish one's late-night rantings and ravings which greatly exceeds my old HTML version in facility and power. I would also like to thank Jeremy Tolbert for installing the basic Movable Type blog files, and for providing a few technical pointers to head me off in the right direction. I believe that most of the older archives have repopulated the history of this place, and I hope that many more words will follow hence.

Posted by Derksen at 11:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

"I figure I've just about got this world buttoned up, so..."
- L. Bob Rife, Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash

This is almost scary in an incredibly geeky-cool sort of way. I guess I'll see YOU on the dune sea...

Posted by Derksen at 12:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Musically and technically savvy, those Austin-hipsters rock my world. Why not set up a 2.6gig bittorrent file offering over 770 different song files from artists participating in the music festival, the ultimate in "try before you trek on down here and listen to the band, okay" marketing:

TRY ME.

Oh yeah.

Posted by Derksen at 12:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Today I went out and purchased the score to the "Two Towers" film in order to amuse myself while driving, and because I think Howard Shore is a fine composer. This was good, and the score is wonderful, emotive - full of epic heroism and stark treachery - the kind of thing that you expect to hear and see when you go to the movies.

What was not wonderful, and what was not expected was what appears to be some form of copy protection imposed by Reprise Records and Warner Music Group.

While the disc plays perfectly in my car's disc player, and just fine in my home stereo system - all sounds will cease should I attempt to listen to it in my computer's disc player and then read or write any sort of data from the hard drive at the same time. Writing this article and attempting to absorb Mr. Shore's work has become a tortuous exercise in sado-masochism.

God forbid that I try and play it on my XBox.

Continue reading "protected from myself" »

Posted by Derksen at 5:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Why does Derksen update ever so infrequently?

Today, let's explore the path a file must travel to reach your screen!

1. First, Derksen must move the file from his computer's hard drive to a 3.5" floppy disk. He must use the floppy and not FTP as he has no home internet access at this time.
   
2. Then Derksen must take his floppy to a public library, where he must upload the files, and e-mail them to himself as either text or an enclosure because the public library's security system will not let him FTP directly to the TUG server.
   
3. Now Derksen must go to his office at work, log in, download and save the attached files to that machine's hard drive. He can not simply bring the floppy in to work, as the office machines have no disk drives.
   
4. Once this has been accomplished, Derksen may finally FTP the files to the TUG server.
   
5. Using the magic of the internet, and the browser of your choice - you can download these files from our server, and view them on your computer!
   

Sheesh.

Needless to say, this involves quite a bit of driving from place to place - and if at any point a file chooses to become corrupted, it usually means starting right back over at step one again.

This sort of thing can become very frustrating, very fast.

Posted by Derksen at 8:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)